Back to the Meadows

“Perhaps that is what returning to old places does. It makes time more visible.”

Journal Entry: Back to the Meadows

I don't think this chapter began with nostalgia, at least not in the way I have traditionally understood nostalgia. I wasn't sitting there wishing I could go back or trying to recreate some period of my life because I thought things were better then. It was more that I started thinking about why certain places seem to stay with us long after we've physically left them, and why sometimes you can go back somewhere years later and suddenly find yourself thinking about a version of yourself you haven't really thought about for years.

The Meadows was a place near where I grew up. Anyone who knew me then will probably know exactly where I mean. Despite the name, it wasn't an actual meadow, which I always find slightly funny now, but it was one of those places that became part of childhood simply because you kept passing through it. You went there, you drove through it, things happened around it, and none of it seemed particularly important because you were just living your life.

I obviously had no idea that thirty years later the name would mean anything to me.

There is one memory in particular that I keep coming back to.

I was sitting in the front passenger seat of the car while my dad was driving. It was just the two of us. I can't remember where we were going or what we'd been doing, and most of the actual journey has completely disappeared from my memory. I don't know what time of day it was, I don't remember what the weather was doing, and I couldn't tell you what we'd been talking about before this particular bit of the conversation.

But I remember crossing The Meadows – that part is vividly clear in my mind.

And I remember my dad saying that one day I'd be driving him around, just like he was driving me.

I was probably about ten, give or take, and I remember thinking that was almost impossible to imagine. I couldn't picture myself being an adult, never mind driving my dad around. He was the dad. I was the kid sitting in the passenger seat.

I remember having this ridiculous image in my head of being behind the steering wheel, being far too small to reach the pedals properly and somehow trying to drive the car while completely unable to reach the brakes.

The sheer panic of it.

It sounds stupid now, obviously, but I remember the feeling of not being able to imagine that future at all. It wasn't just the driving either. The conversation moved on to me having a family one day and that seemed just as impossible. I understood what he was saying, but I couldn't actually picture any of it because I had absolutely no reference point for what being that person would feel like.

The future was just something adults talked about.

And then, somehow, I became that adult.

I've driven my mum and dad around countless times since then. I've picked them up, dropped them off, driven them places, sat behind the same wheel doing exactly what my dad had described to me when I was a kid.

And for years I never really stopped to think about it.

There wasn't a particular day when I suddenly became the person sitting behind the wheel. No big moment where adulthood arrived and announced itself.

It just happened.

One year became another and eventually I was living inside this future that the ten-year-old version of me couldn't really imagine.

That feels strange when I actually stop and think about it.

We spend so much time waiting for things to happen. Birthdays, Christmas, finishing school, getting a job, getting married, having children, whatever it is. We imagine that when the important things happen we'll notice them properly, but so much of life doesn't work like that. The really significant changes can happen so gradually that you don't notice you've crossed the line until you're miles down the road.

I suppose that's partly what happened with The Meadows.

The place itself probably isn't particularly interesting. Roads, houses, buildings, whatever is there now. I'm sure some of it has changed and some of it probably hasn't.

But I can drive those roads now and think about that little boy sitting in the passenger seat, listening to his dad talk about a future he couldn't picture.

And then there's me, driving them around.

It's a strange thing to hold in your head at the same time.

My dad then / My dad now.

Me then / Me now.

The people who weren't in my life then but are completely central to it now. My own family. My children. All the things that happened in between. And there are people who were part of that earlier version of my life who aren't here anymore either. You don't really think about all of that when you're ten.

You probably shouldn't. You just look out of the window.

That's what I remember most about being in the passenger seat. Looking out of the window and watching things go past while my dad talked. I wasn't thinking about time or childhood or what any of it would mean thirty years later. I was just there.

And I think that's probably why the music for this chapter came from somewhere slightly different.

These aren't songs from my childhood. I wasn't trying to make some sort of soundtrack to the past or recreate what I would have heard sitting in that car. In fact, quite a lot of the music wouldn't have made any sense to that ten-year-old at all.

It was more about the feeling of being in that passenger seat.

Looking out of the window. The roads moving past. Someone older than you talking about a future you haven't got any idea how to imagine. And now being old enough to understand what he was actually talking about. That's probably the bit that gets me.

When I drive those roads now with this music playing, it doesn't really take me back. I'm not suddenly ten again. I don't even particularly want to be.

It's more like the two things sit next to each other for a while.

I can be where I am now and still have that memory of being there then.

Sometimes a track will come in and I'll get that strange feeling of familiarity even though I've never heard the track before. I like that about music. Something can feel like a memory without actually being one.

I don't know how else to explain it. You recognise the feeling before you recognise where it came from.

That's probably what I was chasing with some of this session.

Not the songs I remembered, but something that felt like remembering.

There is an actual meadow near where I live now too, which I hadn't really connected with The Meadows until I started putting this chapter together. I walk there quite often, usually when I need to get out for a bit and clear my head.

They're completely different places. Different landscapes, different part of my life, different reasons for being there. But I do find myself wondering whether that's just something we do as we get older. We find new places to hold things.

The old places have already done their job. They've collected whatever they were going to collect from us, and then life moves on and you find somewhere else to walk, somewhere else to sit, somewhere else to think. Maybe that's bollocks. I don't know.

It sounds like the sort of thing you could easily write because it sounds nice, and I've become quite suspicious of things that sound too neat when I'm writing these.

Memory isn't neat anyway.

It doesn't come back as a complete film. It comes back in bits. A view from a car window. A voice. The feeling of a particular road. Something somebody said that you didn't understand at the time but somehow remembered anyway. You forget loads of the actual detail.

Then one completely unimportant thing survives for thirty years. I think that's what happened with my dad saying I'd drive him around one day. It's such an ordinary thing for a parent to say to a child. He probably didn't think anything of it. I certainly didn't.

But here I am all these years later thinking about it while I'm actually doing the thing he described. And that makes me wonder what I'm saying to my own kids now that they'll remember for reasons I can't possibly know yet.

That's quite a weird thought.

They are probably listening to about ten percent of what I say.

Maybe less.

But somewhere in amongst all the things they forget, there will probably be some completely ordinary sentence that stays with them for thirty years. You just don't know which one.

The chapter itself ended up moving in a similar way for me. I wasn't trying to make it arrive anywhere in particular. I was more interested in that feeling of moving through somewhere familiar without ever quite knowing whether what you're recognising belongs to the place or to yourself.

There are bits that feel familiar without being connected to a specific memory, then something else comes along and suddenly I'm back in that car again.

Not literally. Just enough to remember the feeling. And then it's gone. I quite like that.

I don't think we need to recover everything from the past. Some things are probably better left as fragments. I don't need to know exactly what road we were on that day or what we'd been doing beforehand. The fact that I remember him saying it seems to be enough.

The person I was then isn't coming back. And I don't really want him to. I've got too much now.

A family of my own. Children. Responsibilities. Memories that the ten-year-old me couldn't possibly have imagined. I've travelled roads that once seemed endless and now seem ridiculously short.

I've become the grown-up he was talking about. And yet there are still moments when I feel exactly like that kid.

I don't think that's particularly unusual. I suppose we carry all these versions of ourselves around without really noticing. The child, the teenager, the person you were in your twenties, the person you were before you had kids, before you got married, before you moved house, before whatever happened next.

They don't disappear.

They just get buried under everything that comes afterwards.

The Meadows still exists. It carries on being whatever it is now, completely unaware of what it represents to me. There will be people driving through it today who have their own lives going on and absolutely no idea that thirty years ago a ten-year-old boy was sitting in the passenger seat while his dad told him that one day he'd be the one driving.

And that's fine. The place doesn't need to know. The meaning is mine. The meadow near where I live now doesn't know either. I walk there and think about things and then I go home. Tomorrow someone else will walk through it thinking about something completely different.

Maybe that's what places are really good at.

They don't ask anything of you. They just give you somewhere to be. And sometimes, if you've got enough history behind you, being somewhere familiar is enough to make you notice how far you've actually travelled.

That's probably what happened with this chapter. I wasn't trying to go back to The Meadows. I was thinking about the distance between that passenger seat and where I am now. About how much life fits into that distance without you noticing it happening. And then I thought about my dad saying, one day you'll be driving me around.

He was right - obviously he was right.

But I almost missed it. I think that's the bit I'll probably carry from this. Not some grand lesson about time. Just the fact that there I was, a little boy sitting beside his dad, unable to imagine the future he was describing, and somehow I've ended up living it.

That's quite something when you stop and think about it. And maybe that's why I keep coming back to these roads. Not because I want to go back. Just because every now and then it's nice to remember where you came from while you're still moving forward.